Business Agility

Mark Carney Just Described Your Organisation’s Biggest Risk

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Two days ago at Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister delivered a blunt diagnosis. The “rules-based international order” is over. It’s now a “pleasant fiction.” Middle powers can no longer assume the old architecture will hold. “If you are not at the table,” he warned, “you are on the menu.” His prescription: stop relying on what worked … Read more

Beyond Cynefin: Nine Months Later—What We’ve Learned

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Nine months ago, I published a piece positioning CIRCA-CLEAR as a complement to Cynefin—arguing that while Cynefin maps the terrain, CIRCA senses the turbulence. Check out the original post Beyond Cynefin: How CIRCA Helps Leaders Make Sense of Today’s Complexity The response was thoughtful. But the ground has shifted again. And this time, it’s teaching … Read more

When “Be Resilient” Isn’t Enough: Three Cases That Expose the BANI Gap

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In preparing for the Agile Business Consortium‘s recent Professional Masterclass, I found myself pondering the key case study. Months prior, I’d committed to a bold session title: ‘Decode the Chaos: A Masterclass in Leading with the CIRCA–CLEAR Framework.’ The workshop promise was significant: to equip leaders with the insight to diagnose systemic challenges and shift … Read more

From Weather Report to Navigation System

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VUCA is dead. Long live BANI. Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares the shift complete. Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – better captures the fractured reality leaders face. Kruse is right. VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm. It doesn’t anymore. But here’s what the VUCA-to-BANI conversation keeps missing: we’ve upgraded the weather … Read more

BANI Is Right. It’s Also Not Enough.

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Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares VUCA dead. BANI is the new lens. He’s not wrong. Kruse articulates it sharply: VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm, uncertainty could be waited out, and complexity followed patterns. Those assumptions no longer hold. Today’s systems are brittle, anxiety is endemic, outcomes are nonlinear, and comprehensibility feels impossible. The diagnosis … Read more

The Core Misdiagnosis That Causes Agile Transformations to Fail: Misreading Signals for Agility

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In hundreds of organizations I’ve worked with over the past two decades, one pattern repeats itself: well-intentioned efforts to implement agility often fail—not because teams aren’t trying, but because the underlying problem is misdiagnosed. I’ve seen this both as a leader of initiatives and as an expert recovery practitioner, repeatedly drafted in to turn around … Read more